"Who'll buy babies—Babies better dead?Here's every mental category,From C3 down to Z...."
"Who'll buy babies—Babies better dead?Here's every mental category,From C3 down to Z...."
It was a taking song as she crooned it on the stage, nursing an infant on each arm, and with a baby-chorus crying behind her.
After breakfast on Sunday morning Kitty remarked that she was going by train to Beaconsfield, where she had arranged to meet Chester for a walk through Burnham Beeches. She as a rule made no secret of her walks with Chester, only occasionally, when self-consciousness took her. After all, why should she? One went walks with all sorts of people, with any man or woman who liked walking and talking and whom one liked as a companion; it implied nothing. Kitty at times, with all it meant in this instance burning and alive in her consciousness, had to pause to tell herself how little it did imply to others, how she might mention it freely and casually, without fear. Yet might she? The intimacy of the Minister of a Department with one of his clerkswas, no doubt, out of the ordinary, not quite like other intimacies; perhaps it did seem odd, and imply things. Perhaps Kitty might have thought so herself, in another case.
She announced her plan this morning with an extra note of casualness in her voice.
Pansy said, "Oh, you two. You'll be goin' baby-huntin' in the ditches, I should think, instead of pickin' primroses. I should say you jolly well ought, and you'd better take the Cheeper's pram with you."
Anthony said, "Exactly what I always trynotto do, going out on Sundays with the people from my shop. It spoils the Sabbath rest, the Pisgah's mountain touch. You'd much better come out with Cyril and Pansy and me."
"I," said Cyril, in his detached manner, "shall be going to Mass."
They walked up through the depraved mushroom growth round Beaconsfield station to the old town that city set on a hill, lying wide and spacious, with its four Ends stretched out like a cross. Old Beaconsfield is an enchanted city; as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so it is to-day, an ancient country town, full of brick walls and old houses, and courtyards and coaching inns, and dignity and romance and great elms. But they left it behind them, and took the lane that runs to Hedgerley, with the cold April wind in their faces.
They came, four miles on, to the forest of great beeches, where broad glades and grassy rides run in and out through thickets of wild undergrowth and bracken, and ancient twisted boles and slim smooth grey-green stems are set close together under a rustling singing roof of brilliant green, the young, new-born, radiant green of beeches in April. In every hollow and dip of the forest's mossy floor, primroses glimmered in pale pools.
They sat down by one of these pools to have their lunch.
After lunch they lay on there and smoked. Chester lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the green roof. Kitty, her round chin cupped in her two hands, lay and watched his lean, sallow, clever face, foreshortened, with the shadows of the leaves moving on it and his eyes screwed against the sun.
"Kitty," said Chester presently, "I want to talk to you."
"M—m." Kitty, having finished her cigarette, was chewing grass.
He sat up and looked at her, and as he looked his face grew more sallow and his smile died. He stabbed into the soft, damp earth with his stick, and frowned.
"It's this, my dear. I can't go on any longer with this—this farce. We must end it. I've been meaning to tell you so for some time, but I thought I'd give it a fair trial, just to satisfy us both. Well, we've given it a trial, and it won't work. It isn't good enough. We've got to be more to each other—or less. This—this beastly half-way house was all right for a bit; but we've got on too far now for it.... I should like to know whatyouthink about it."
Kitty pulled a primrose to pieces, petal by petal, before she answered.
"One thing I think," she said slowly, "is that I'm different from you. Or is it that women are different from men? Never mind; it doesn't really matter which. But I fancy it's women and men. Anyhow there it is. And the difference is that for me a half-way house would always be better than nothing, while for you it would be worse. Men seem to value being married so much more than women do—and friendship, going about together, having each other to talk to and play with, and all that, seems to matter to them so little. Love seems to take different forms with men and women, and to want different ways of expression.... So it's not much use trying to understand one another about it.... That's the chief thing I think, Nicky."
He moved impatiently.
"In fact, you're contented with the present state of things."
"Oh, no. Not a bit. I want much more. But—if it's all we can have...."
"It isn't," he said. "We can get married."
She shook her head, with decision.
"No. No. No."
"Quite quietly," he pleaded. "No one would know but ourselves and the registrar and a witness whom we'd murder after the ceremony. Why shouldn't we? What are the reasons why not? There are only two; you ought to marry a certificated person and have an intelligent family; and I oughtn't to have a family at all. Well, you say you don't mean to marry anyone else; so you may as well marry me. So much for the first reason. And of course we wouldn't have a family; so much for the second. Well, then?"
"There's a third," said Kitty. "And the only important one. There's the look of the thing. I don't care how many people we murder, the secret will leak out. Things always do leak out. Never, in the course of twenty-nine years of endeavour, have I been able to keep anything shady from coming to light sooner or later. It isn't done. You ought to know that, as a government servant. Has any government ever succeeded in keeping its own dark doings secret for long? No; they come out like—like flowers pushing up towards daylight; and then there's the devil to pay. All our shadiest departmental transactions emerge one by one; nothing is hid that shall not be revealed. And our marriage would be the same. Be sure our sin would find us out. And that would be the end of your career, and probably of the Ministry as well; I believe the Ministry will stand or fall with you; and it's already pretty tottery.... It's a pity you can't get exemption; but of course your case is one in which it's absolutely never given.... No, we can't do this thing. You're the Minister of Brains first, and poor Nicky Chester, who would like to marry his girl, a long, long way behind. And the poor girl who would like to marry Nicky Chester—she's not got to count at all.... I don't want to be high-falutin and to talk about principles, only to have a little sense."
He was watching her moodily from under bent brows, leaning back against a beech-trunk and pulling up little handfuls of damp moss with his thin, unusual fingers.
"Sense," he repeated. "It is sense, to have what one wants, if it doesn't harm anything or anyone. And I'll tell you another thing—not having it is rotting me up altogether—me and my work. I didn't want to fall in love again; I hoped I'd done with all that; I tried not to take any notice of you. But it was no go, and I can't fall out again, and I'm dead sick of going on like this. And my experience of life, both private and public, has been longer than yours, and, as it happens, I've known of several transactions which haven't come to light and never will; I've perpetrated some myself in the Ministry, which even that clear light which beats upon a hotel hasn't yet exposed, and, heaven helping us, won't. You don't suppose all the dark secrets of the war ever came out? Of course they didn't. There are some that will wait till ... well, till the next war, let's say.... Kitty, let's try it. It's worth the risk, surely. Let's be sporting. We're missing—we're missing the best thing in the world, just out of funk. I thought you always did things, just for the sake of doing them. I thought you never turned your back on life. It isn't like you."
"Oh," murmured Kitty. "Life.... There's so much of that. This is just one thing out of it."
"While you want it," he returned, indubitably correct as to this, "it seems a long way the most important thing."
"It does," she agreed. "There's no comparison at all.... It's queer, isn't it, how strong it is, this odd, desperate wanting of one person out of all the world. It's an extraordinary, enormously strong thing.... But thereareother things. There are jokes, and shops, and music, and plays, and pictures, and nice clothes, and Russian politics, and absurd people, and Greek poetry, and the world's failures caged together on one island, and things to eat and to drink, and our careers, and primroses in woods, and the censor.... Good gracious, it's all like an idiotic, glorified revue. We mustn't let the one thing, just because it matters most, matter alone. It's so commonplace. Our hearts aren't broken, and won't break. We're out to have a good time, and we'll let love and marriage go to the—anywhere they like, if we can't have them.... By the way, if it's any comfort to you (it is to me) I shouldn't make at all a good wife; I'm much nicer as a friend. I want too much out of life. I'm grasping and selfish. You'd find me tiring."
"I do," he returned. "You're tiring me to death now. I've plenty of friends already, thank you. And what does it matter to me what sort of a wife you'd make? You talk as if you were refusing a secretarial appointment. I wantyou, not a wife."
"You've got me," said Kitty, "only not as a wife.... If that's no use to you, we'll give it up. Nicky, I suppose we'dbettergive it up. It isn't working. I'll go right away. I'll get another job."
"No," he said gloomily. "There's no need for that. Why should you mess up your career? We needn't meet. We shouldn't naturally meet, unless we made opportunities. I think you're right, that we'd better not meet. What's the good of meeting, just to repeat this sort of scene again and again, and hurt each other? We've reached the breaking point; I can't bear any more.... I think we'd better leave it that you let me know when you change your mind and will marry me. You will, won't you, when you do?"
"Yes," said Kitty, and could say no more than that because she was on the edge of tears.
For a moment they clung together, holding each other close. He said, "My dearest dear, I love you. Can't you?... can't you?..." and she whispered, very pale, "I love you. I think I worship you," and laid her cheek on his hand, so that he felt her tears.
They walked on together through the April afternoon, and it cried to them like a child whom they were betraying and forsaking. There would not be another day like this day, through all the lovely awakening spring and summer.
Ivy and Betty Delmer, who had been spending the afternoon at Beaconsfield, saw them at Beaconsfield station.
Betty said, "Surely that's your Minister with Miss Grammont."
Ivy looked at them, down the length of the platform. It seemed to her that Miss Grammont's walk with the Minister hadn't been altogether a success; they both looked so pale and tired, and Miss Grammont, surely, had been crying.
Something suddenly passed into Ivy's consciousness about these two people whom she admired, and her soft mouth dropped open a little with the amazement of her thoughts. The Minister—and Miss Grammont! It was surely incredible. Ministers didn't; they were too high, too superior. Besides, what had love to do with this Minister, who was uncertificated for matrimony? Ivy told herself she was mistaken, she had misread the look with which they had looked at each other as they parted.
"Are they thick?" Betty was asking, with careless, inquisitive interest. Betty wouldn't think it odd; Betty didn't know anything about ministers in general or this minister in particular.
"Oh, I think they know each other quite well," replied Ivy. "Miss Grammont's jolly clever, you know. I shouldn't wonder if he talks about quite important things to her."
"How dull," returned Betty, swinging her primroses. "Don't let's get into the same carriage as her. I never know if I know those End House people or not; Daddy and mother think I don't, and it's awkward.... I'd rather enjoy knowing Miss Ponsonby and that ducky baby, even if they aren't respectable, she looks so sweet, and I'd like to hear all about the stage. But I've no use for your Miss Grammont. Her clothes are all right, but I'm sure she's stuck up.... Fancy going out for Sunday with the Minister of a government department! Rather her than me."
Ivy said, "Don't you worry, my child. No Minister'll ever troubleyouto go out with him. As for Chester, I should think he'd have you executed after one talk; he's great on ridding the world of the mentally deficient." But what she was thinking was, "How fearfully interesting if there is anything between them." She wondered what the other people at the office thought about it, or if they had ever thought about it at all.
To Kitty it was manifest that the time had come for a change of employment. Such times came frequently in her life; often merely because she got bored, yawned, wanted a change, heard life summoning her to fresh woods and pastures new, and obeyed the call. Many occupations she had thus thrown up lightly; this is one reason why those who regard life as a variety entertainment do not really get on; they forget that life is real, life is earnest, and departing leave behind them no footprints on the sands of time. They do not make a career; they do not make good; they do not, in the long run, even make much money, though that rolls in by fits and starts, and at times plentifully. They do not so much hide their talents in napkins as play ball with them.
This is as much as to say that it was not to Kitty Grammont the effort and the wrench that it would have been to many people to contemplate a change of avocation. And it certainly seemed desirable. Chester had said, "We needn't meet"; but the fact remained that when two people who love each other work in the same building, however remote their spheres, they disturb each other, are conscious of each other's nearness. And Chester's presence pervaded the whole Ministry; he had stamped himself everywhere; there was no getting away from him. His name was constantly on the lips and on the pens of his subordinates, and clicked forth from every typewriter; you could not so much as write an official letter without beginning "I am directed by the Minister of Brains to state," and signing it "for the Minister of Brains." Besides which, he was to be seen going out and coming in, to be met in passages and lifts, to be observed taking his food in the canteen, and his Personal Assistant demanded continual attention to him on the telephone. No, there was no getting away from the Minister. And that meant no peace of mind, none of the old careless light-hearted living and working; nothing but a continual, disturbing, restless, aching want. Kitty had no intention of facing this, so she told Vernon Prideaux that when she found another job she was going to leave. He looked at her in annoyance and dismay, and said, "Good lord, why?"
Kitty said, "I'm bored. I want a change. I'm tired of working for this autocratic government. I want something with more variety in it, and more soul—a travelling circus, or a companionship to a rich American seeing the world; or any old thing, so long as it amuses me."
"There's going to be quite enough amusement inthiscircus," said Prideaux, "before we're through with it, to satisfy anyone, I should say.... Really, Kitty, I think you're foolish. You're throwing up your chances; you're climbing up, and will climb higher if you stay. Even if the thing founders, as is quite likely, you'll climb out of it into another job, you're good enough. You ought to think of your career. And besides, you can't be spared. Who on earth do you think is going to do your job? I think you ought to see this thing through."
But Kitty did not think so. "It will go to its own place quite quickly enough without my help. And as for my career—funny word—I'm not sure I've got one. If I have it's such a chequered one that a few more ups and downs won't make much difference to it. And as for being spared, oh anyone can be spared, out of any ministry; there are too many of us. Anyhow—well anyhow I must go."
Prideaux thought this so frivolous, so foolish, so unworthy, so tiresome, and so like a woman, that he was exasperated. He rang for a shorthand typist, remarking, "If you must you must. Miss Egerton" (Miss Egerton had succeeded Miss Pomfrey, and was better), "send to the Establishment Branch for Miss Grammont's papers sometime," which closed the subject for the present.
Kitty went back to her table and wrote a letter to the A.S.E. about some unfortunate agreement which had been made with them concerning the exemption of some of their members from the Mind Training Course. Personally Kitty was of the opinion that it was a pity the agreement had not been made as extensive as the A.S.E. desired; she thought that this Union were already too clever by half. She almost went to the length of thinking it was a pity the promises made to them had not been kept; a revolutionary opinion which in itself indicated that it was time she left. Having dealt with the A.S.E. she turned her attention to a file sent down from M.B. 1 and minuted "Passed to you to deal with this man's imaginary grievance." The imaginary grievance was that the wife of the man in question had been killed by a motor bus, and he wanted a week's postponement of his Mind Training Course in order that he might arrange about the funeral. M.B. 1 were like that; they did not mean to be unkind, but were a little lacking in flexibility and imagination.
Ivy Delmer, who had answered Prideaux's bell, sat with her pencil ready and her round face bent over her notebook. She had heard Prideaux's order to his secretary, and concluded, correctly, that Miss Grammont was either going to have her pay raised or to leave, and from Prideaux's manner and voice she thought it was the second. She wondered whether this could have anything to do with the Minister, and what he had been saying to Miss Grammont on Sunday. She was curious and interested, even more so than she had been on Sunday, because the people to whom she had mentioned the subject had all noticed the intimacy; everyone seemed to have seen the Minister out with Miss Grammont at one time or another. No one but Ivy thought it was anything more than friendship, but no one else had seen them look at one another on Beaconsfield platform. Ivy had, and said so....
Kitty was right; nothing remained hidden in government departments, or, indeed, anywhere else. Healthily, persistently, inevitably, everything pushed up towards the clear light of day; and quite right, too.
In the evenings Kitty, seeking jobs, studied the advertisement columns of the daily papers. She had always read them; they, with Mr. Selfridge and the Pelman system, form the lighter and more entertaining part of any daily paper; but now she took to perusing them with care. The personal column of theTimesshe found peculiarly edifying.
"Quiet, refined gentleman (served in war, musical) would like to get into touch with bright and sympathetic lady." Kitty rejected that; she was not sure that she was sympathetic, and the terms were too vague. Better was "Lady, high standard of taste and culture and large means, wants capable travelling companion. Knowledge of art essential, good breeding preferred. Must talk continental languages fluently and understand railway guides." Kitty, making a mental note of that (for, with the possible exception of the breeding, she had all these qualifications), ran her eyes down the column, past "Write to me, darling, all is forgiven," "Will the lady in a fur toque riding in a Hammersmith aero on Saturday last at 3.30 communicate with A.C.", "No man hath seen God, at any time," until she came to "Young, accomplished, well-educated War Widow would like position as secretary or confidential clerk to nobleman, member of parliament, or gentleman." She rested her finger on that. "I'll put one in like this," she remarked to her cousin. "War Widow. That's what I've always wanted to be. It sounds so well. Elspeth, I shall buy some weeds and commence widow. A war widow...."
"If you want a new job, and a job with travel and life in it," said her cousin, sounding her, "I don't know why you don't go out to the Pacific Islands and join Neil. You may be sure that wherever Neil is there'll be travel enough and life enough." She watched Kitty idly through a little whirl of cigarette smoke. But Kitty looked no more than bored, bending over theTimesand manicuring her nails.
"Neil would tire me. I've grown too old for Neil. Besides, it wouldn't be proper; I've broken off my engagement. I've not had the last letter back yet, you know, so he may have got it. Besides..." Kitty paused only for a moment, and added in the same casual tone, "besides, I'm too much in love with Nicky Chester, though I can't have him, to have any use for anyone else just now."
Her cousin nodded. "I knew that, darling, of course. And so you've renounced each other. How silly. But it won't last. It never does. Go and be a Young Accomplished War Widow, then, to pass the time."
But there were hours of the night when it seemed to Kitty that she could not go and be a Young Accomplished War Widow, that she could not be companion, however capable, to any travelling lady of taste, culture and means, or clerk, however confidential, to any peer, M.P., or even gentleman; that none of these careers (were they careers? She still sought to define that word) would pass the time at all; that nothing, in fact, would pass it except working for Nicholas Chester, seeing him sometimes, hearing his voice.... Always addicted to metaphysical speculation in the night, even in nights of anguish, she would speculate on this queer disease, so common to the race, which had overtaken (and not, as they had both candidly remarked, for the first time, possibly not even for the last) herself and Nicholas Chester. What was it, this extraordinary driving pressure of emotion, this quite disproportionate desire for companionship with, for contact with, one person out of all the world of people and things, which made, while it lasted, all other desires, all other emotions, pale and faint beside it? Which so perverted and wrenched from its bearings the mind of a man like Nicholas Chester that he was for throwing overboard the cherished principles which were the cargo he had for long been so desperately bent on carrying, through storm and stress, to the country of his dreams? Which made him say, "No one will find out, and if they do, let them and be damned to them"?... Desire for a person; it had, it had always had, an extraordinarily dynamic effect on the lives of men and women. When it came into play, principle, chivalry, common sense, intellect, humour, culture, sweetness and light, all we call civilisation, might crumple up like match-board so this one overwhelming desire, shared by all the animal creation, might be satisfied. On this rock the world, the pathetic, eager, clever, foolish, so heavily handicapped world, might be wrecked. It was, perhaps, this one thing that would always prevent humanity from being, in fact, a clever and successful race, would always keep them down somewhere near the level of the other animals.
Faces passed before Kitty's wakeful eyes; the fatuous, contented faces of mothers bending over the rewards of love clinging to their breasts; slow, placid, married faces everywhere.... This thing was irresistible, and certainly inevitable; if it ceased, humanity itself would cease, since it is the one motive which impels the continued population of the already over-populated earth. There it was; one had to accept it; there was, perhaps, no one who grew to years of maturity who escaped it, no one whose life would not, at some period, be in some degree disorganised by this strange force. It was blind instinct; its indulgence did not, in the end, even make for good, so far as good meant adventure, romance, and the gay chances of life, the freedom of the cities of the world—anything beyond mere domesticity. For what, after all, was marriage? A tying down, a shutting of gates, the end of youth, the curbing of the spirit of adventure which seeks to claim all the four corners of the world for its heritage. It meant a circumscribed and sober life, in one place, in one house, with, perhaps, children to support and to mind; it meant becoming respectable, insured, mature, settled members of society, with a stake in the country. No longer may life be greeted with a jest and death with a grin; both these (of course important but not necessarily solemn) things have come to matter too much to be played with.
To this sedate end do the world's gay and careless free-lances come; they shut the door upon the challenging spirit of life, and Settle Down. It is to this end that instinct, not to be denied, summons men and women, as the bit of cheese summons the mouse into the trap.
Musing thus, Kitty turned her pillow over and over, seeking a softer side. How she detested stupidity! How, even more, Nicholas Chester loathed stupidity! To him it was anathema, the root of all evil, the Goliath he was out to destroy, the blind beast squatting on men's bones, the idiot drivelling on the village green. And here he was, caught in the beast's destroying grip, just because he had, as they call it, fallen in love.... What a work is man!... And here was Kitty herself, all her gay love of living in danger, tottering unsteadily on its foundations, undermined by this secret gnawing thing.
At last, as a sop to the craving which would not be denied, she sat up, with aching, fevered head, and turned the light on, and wrote on a piece of paper, "Nicky, I'll marry you any time you like, if you want me to," and folded it up and laid it on the table at her side, and then lay quite quiet, the restless longing stilled in her, slow tears forcing themselves from under her closed lashes, because she knew she would not send it. She would not send it because Chester too, in his heart, knew that they had better part; he too was fighting for the cause he believed in; he wanted her, but wanted to succeed in doing without her. She must give him his chance to stick by his principles, not drag him down below them.
There were moments when Kitty wished that she could believe in a God, and could pray. It must, she thought, be a comfort. She even at times wished she were a Christian, to find fulfilment in loss. That was, at least, what she supposed Christians to do.
But she could not be a Christian, and she could not pray; all she could do was to nerve herself to meet life in the spirit of the gay pierrette, with cap and bells on her aching head, and a little powder to hide the tears, and to try not to snap at Elspeth or the people at the office. This last endeavour usually failed. The little gaping messengers who answered (when they thought they would) Miss Grammont's bell, told each other Miss Grammont was cross. The typists grew tired of having letters sent back to be retyped because of some trifling misapprehension of Miss Grammont's caligraphy or some trifling misspelling on their own account. Surely these things could be set right with a pen and a little skill.
These moods of impatience, when frustration vented itself in anger, alternated with the gaiety, the irreverent and often profane levity, which was Kitty's habitual way of braving life in its more formidable aspects. Some people have this instinct, to nail a flag of motley to the mast of the foundering ship and keep it flying to the last.
While Kitty was debating as to her future, toying with the relative advantages and entertainment to be derived from the careers of War Widow, Confidential Clerk, Travelling Companion, archæological explorer in Macedonia or Crete, beginner on the music-hall stage, under Pansy's auspices, all of which seemed to have their bright sides, two suggestions were made to her. One was from a cousin of hers who was sub-editor ofStop It, and offered to get her a place on the staff.
"Would it bind me to a point of view?" Kitty enquired. "I can't be bound to a point of view."
"Oh dear no," her cousin assured her. "Certainly not. Rather the contrary," and Kitty said, "All right, I'll think it over." She was rather attracted by the idea.
You cannot, of course, exactly call it being bound to a point of view to be required to hint every week that certain things want stopping, in a world whose staunchest champions must admit that this is indeed so.
Stop Itwas certainly eclectic, in its picking out, from all the recognised groups associated for thought and action, activities whose cessation seemed good to it. The question that rather suggested itself to its readers was, ifStop Ithad its way, what, if anything, would be left?
"Very little," the editor would have answered. "A clean sheet. Then we can begin again."
Stop Ithad dropped some of the caution with which it had begun: it was now quite often possible to deduce from its still cryptic phraseology what were some of the things it wanted stopped. Having for some time successfully dodged Dora, it was now daring her. As in all probability it would not have a long life, and appeared to be having a merry one, Kitty thought she might as well join it while she could.
To desert abruptly from the ranks of the bureaucracy to those of the mutineers seemed natural to Kitty, who had always found herself at home in a number of widely differing situations. Really this is perhaps the only way to live, if all the various and so greatly different needs of complicated human nature are to be satisfied. It is very certain that they cannot be satisfied simultaneously; the best way seems, therefore, to alternate. It is indeed strange that this is not more done, that Radicals, Tories, and Labour members, for instance, do not more frequently interchange, play general post, to satisfy on Tuesday that side of their souls and intellects which has not been given free play on Monday; that Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Lord Curzon do not, from time to time, deliver each other's speeches, not from any freakish desire to astonish, but from the sheer necessities of their natures; that Mr. Massingham and Mr. Leo Maxse, or Mr. A. G. Gardiner and Mr. Gwynne, or Mr. J. C. Squire and Mr. J. St. Loe Strachey, or Mr. Garvin and Mr. J. A. Spender, do not from time to time arrange together to change offices and run each other's papers; or that Mr. Arthur Ransome and Mr. Stephen Graham do not, during their tours of Russia, sometimes change pens with each other when they write home. There must be in many people some undemocratic instinct of centralisation, of autocratic subversion of the horde of their lesser opinions and impulses to the most dominant and commanding one, a lack of the true democrat's desire to give a chance to them all. They say with the Psalmist, "My heart is fixed," and "I have chosen the way and I will run it to the end," and this is called, by some, finding one's true self. Perhaps it may be so; it certainly entails the loss of many other selves; and possibly the dropping of these, or rather their continual denial and gradual atrophy, simplifies life.
But Kitty, whose heart was not fixed, entered upon all the changing scenes of life with a readiness to embrace any point of view, though not indeed to be bound to it, and an even greater willingness to tell anything in earth or heaven that it ought to be stopped.
She told Prideaux that she was considering this offer. Prideaux said, "That thing! Its very name condemns it. It's on the wrong tack. You shouldn't be out to stop things; they've got to go on.... If it's journalism you want, why don't you apply for a job onIntelligence?"Intelligence, or the Weekly Bulletin of the Brains Ministry (to give it its sub-title, humorously chosen by one who visualised either the public or the Ministry as a sick man) was a weekly journal issued by the Ministry, and its aim was, besides reporting the Ministry's work, decisions and pronouncements for each week, to correlate all its local activities and keep them in touch with headquarters, and to collect reports from over the country as to the state of the public mind. It was for official circulation only. "Why not?" repeated Prideaux, struck by this idea. "It would be quite enough of a change: you would probably be one of the travelling reporters and send bright little anecdotes from the countryside; I know they want some more reporters. Why don't you apply? I'll speak to M.B.B. about you if you like." (M.B.B. was the department which edited the Bulletin.)
"Would it be interesting?" Kitty wondered.
Prideaux thought it would. "Besides," he added, "you'd remain attached to the Ministry that way, and could return to headquarters later on if you wanted to.... And meanwhile you'd see all the fun.... We're in for a fairly lively time, and it would be a pity to miss it. We're bound to slip up over the A.S.E. before the month's over. And probably over the exemption of Imbeciles and the Abandoned Babies, too. And the journalists; that's going to be a bad snag. Oh, it'll be interesting all right. If it wasn't for Chester's remarkable gift of getting on people's right side, it would be a poor look-out. But Chester'd pull most things through. If they'd put him at the head of the Recruiting job during the war, I believe he'd have pulled even the Review of Exceptions through without a row.... Well now, what about trying for this job?"
"All right," Kitty agreed. "If you think there's any chance of my getting it. I don't mind much what I do, so long as I have a change from this hotel."
On Prideaux's recommendation she did get the job, and was transferred from her branch to M.B.B. as a travelling reporter forIntelligence. She renouncedStop Itwith some regret; there was a whimsical element aboutStop Itwhich appealed to her, and which must almost necessarily be lacking in an official journal; but the career of travelling reporter seemed to have possibilities. Besides the more weighty reports from the countryside, a page ofIntelligencewas devoted each week to anecdotes related in the engagingly sudden and irrelevant manner of our cheaper daily Press; as, "A woman appealed before the Cuckfield Tribunal for exemption from the Mind Training Course on the grounds that she had made an uncertificated marriage and had since had twins, and must, therefore, be of a mental level which unfitted her to derive benefit from the Course." "Three babies have been found abandoned in a ditch between Amersham and Chesham Bois." "The Essex Farmers' Association have produced a strain of hens which lay an egg each day all the year round. The farmers ascribe this to the improvement in their methods caused by the Mind Training Course." "In reply to a tinplate worker who applied for Occupational Exemption from the Mental Progress Act, the Chairman of the Margam Tribunal said ..." (one of the witty things which chairmen do say, and which need not here be reported). It was, apparently, the business of the reporters to collect (or invent) and communicate these trivial anecdotes, as well as more momentous news, as of unrest at Nottingham, the state of intelligence or otherwise among Suffolk agriculturists, and so forth.
Kitty rather hoped to be sent to Ireland, which was, as often, in an interesting and dubious state. Ireland was excluded from the Brains Acts, as from other Acts. But she was being carefully watched, with a view to including her when it seemed that it might be safe to do so. Meanwhile those of her population who were considered by the English government to be in no need of it were profiting by the Mind Training Course, while the mass of the peasantry were instructed by their priests to shun such unholy heretic learning as they would the devil. But on the whole it seemed possible that the strange paths pointed out by the Brains Ministry might eventually lead to the solution of the Irish Question. (What the Irish Question at that moment was, I will not here attempt to explain: it must be sufficient to remark that there will always be one.)
But Kitty was not sent to Ireland. She was sent about England; first to Cambridge. Cambridge was not averse to having its mind improved; there is a sweet reasonableness about Cambridge. It knows how important brains are. Also it had an affection for Chester, who had been at Trinity. So reports from Cambridge as regards the Brains Acts were on the whole favourable, in spite of some unrest (for different reasons) at Kings, Downing, and Trinity Hall, and slight ferment of revolt down at Barnwell. There was, indeed, a flourishing branch of the S.I.L. (Stop It League) in the University, but its attention was not directed at the moment particularly to stopping the work of the Ministry of Brains.
It was, of course, a queer and quite new Cambridge which Kitty investigated. She had known the pre-war Cambridge; there had intervened the war Cambridge, that desolated and desolating thing, and now there had sprung up, on the other side of that dividing gulf, a Cambridge new and without precedent; a Cambridge half full of young war veterans, with the knowledge of red horizons, battle, murder, and sudden death, in their careless, watchful, experienced eyes; when they lounged about the streets or hurried to lectures, they dropped, against their will, into step; they were brown, and hard, and tired, and found it hard to concentrate on books; they had forgotten their school knowledge, and could not get through Littlegoes, and preferred their beds to sleeping in the open, that joy of pampered youth which has known neither battle-fields or Embankment seats.
The other half were the boys straight from school; and between these two divisions rolled the Great European War, across which they could with difficulty make themselves understood each by the other.
It was a Cambridge which had broken with history, for neither of these sections had any links with the past, any traditions to hand down. The only people who had these were the dons and Fellows and the very few undergraduates who, having broken off their University career to fight, had, after long years, returned to it again. These moved like ghosts among their old haunts; but their number was so inconsiderable as hardly to count. It was, to all intents and purposes, a new Cambridge, a clean sheet; and it was interesting to watch what was being inscribed upon it.
But with such observations, apart from those of them which were connected with the attitude of Cambridge towards the Brains Ministry, neither Kitty nor this story are concerned. The story of the new Cambridge will have to be written some day by a member of it, and should be well worth reading.
From Cambridge Kitty went to travel Cambridgeshire, which was in a state of quiet, albeit grudging, East Anglian acceptance and slow assimilation.
Far different were the northern midlands, which were her next destination. Here, indeed, was revolt in process of ferment; revolt which had to be continually uncorked and aired that it might not ferment too much. The uncorking and airing was done by means of conferences, at which the tyrannised and the tyrants each said their say. These heart-to-heart talks have a soothing effect (sometimes) on the situation; at other times not. As conducted by the Minister of Brains, they certainly had. Chester was something more than soothing; he was inspiring. While he was addressing a meeting, he made it believe that intelligence was the important thing; more important than liberty, more important than the satisfaction of immediate desires. He made intelligence a flaming idea, like patriotism, freedom, peace, democracy, the eight-hour day, or God; and incidentally he pointed out that it would lead to most of these things; and they believed him. When he showed how, in the past, the lack of intelligence had led to national ruin, economic bondage, war, autocracy, poverty, sweating, and vice, they believed that too. When he said, "Look at the European War," they looked. When he went on, "Without centuries of stupidity everywhere the war would never have been; without stupidity the war, if it had been, would have been very differently conducted; without stupidity we need never have another war, but with stupidity we inevitably shall, League of Nations or not," they all roared and cheered.
So he went about saying these things, convincing and propitiating labour everywhere; labour, that formidable monster dreaded and cajoled by all good statesmen; labour, twice as formidable since in the Great War it had learned the ways of battle and the possibility and the power of the union of arms and the man.
It was after such a meeting, at Chesterfield, at the end of July, that Kitty and the Minister next met. Kitty was at that time writing up the Derbyshire towns for the Bulletin. She attended the Chesterfield meeting officially. It was a good one; Chester spoke well, and the audience (mainly colliers) listened well.
It was a very hot evening. The Town Hall was breathless, and full of damp, coal-grimed, imperfectly-cleaned faces. Kitty too was damp, though she was wearing even less than usual. Chester was damp and white, and looked, for all his flame and ardour, which carried the meeting along with him, fatigued and on edge. Kitty, herself fatigued and on edge, watched him, seeing the way his hands moved nervously on the table as he spoke.
It was while he was talking about the demand for increased wages among colliers to facilitate the payment of the taxes on uncertificated babies, that he saw Kitty. His eyes stayed on hers for a moment, and he paused in the middle of a sentence ... "defeat the whole purpose of the Act," he finished it, and looked elsewhere. Kitty was startled by his pause; it was not like him. Normally he, so used to public speaking, so steeled against emergencies, so accustomed to strange irruptions into the flow of his speech, would surely have carried on without a break or a sign. That he had not done so showed him to be in a highly nervous state, thought Kitty, something like her own in this hot weather, through her continual travellings by train and staying in lodgings and writing absurd reports.
Across the length of the hall she saw nothing now but that thin, slouching figure, the gestures of those nervous, flexible hands, that white, damp face, with its crooked eyebrows and smile.
It was so long since she had seen him and spoken to him; something in her surged up at the sight of him and turned her giddy and faint. It was perilously hot; the heat soaked all one's will away and left one limp.... Did he too feel like that?
He looked at her once more, just before the end, and his eyes said, "Wait for me."
She waited, in the front of a little group by the door through which he was to come out. He came out with his secretary, and the mayor, and others; he was talking to them. When he saw her he stopped openly, and said, so that all could hear, "How do you do, Miss Grammont. I haven't seen you for some time. You're doing this reporting work for the Bulletin now, aren't you? I want to talk to you about that. If you'll give me the address I'll come round in about half an hour and see you about it."
She gave him the address of her rooms in Little Darkgate Street, and he nodded and walked on. He had done it well; no one thought it strange, or anything but all in the way of business. Ministers have to be good at camouflage, at throwing veils over situations; it is part of their job.
Kitty went back to her lodgings, and washed again, for the seventeenth time that day, and tried if she would feel less hot and less pale and more the captain of her soul in another and even filmier blouse. But she grew hotter, and paler, and less the captain of anything at all.
At 9.30 Chester came. He too was hot and pale and captain of nothing. He had not even the comfort of a filmy blouse.
He said, "My dear—my dear," and no more for a little time. Then he said, "My dearest, this has got to stop. I can't stand it. We've got to marry."
Kitty said, "Oh well. I suppose we have." She was too hot, too limp, too tired, to suppose anything else.
"At once," said Chester. "I'll get a licence.... We must get it done at some small place in the country where they don't know who we are. I must take another name for it.... There's a place I sometimes stay at, in the Chilterns. They are rather stupid there—even now," he added, with the twist of a rueful smile. "I think it should be pretty safe. Anyhow I don't think I much care; we're going to do it."
They spoke low in the dim, breathless room, with its windows opened wide on to the breathless street.
"I have wanted you," said Chester. "I have wanted you extremely badly these last three months. I have never wanted anything so much. It has been a—a hideous time, taking it all round."
"You certainly," said Kitty, "look as if it had. So do I—don't I? It's partly heat and dirt, with both of us—the black of this townsoaksin—and partly tiredness, and partly, for you, the strain of your ministerial responsibilities, no doubt; but I think a little of it is our broken hearts.... Nicky, I'm too limp to argue or fight. I know it's all wrong, what we're going to do; but I'm like you—I don't think I much care. We'll get married in your stupid village, under a false name. That counts, does it? Oh, all right. I shouldn't particularly mind if it didn't, you know. I'll do without the registry business altogether if you think it's safer. After all, what's the odds? It comes to the same thing in the end, only with less fuss. And it's no one's business but ours."
"No," Chester said. "I think that would be a mistake. Wrong. I don't approve of this omitting of the legal bond; it argues a lack of the sense of social ethics; it opens the door to a state of things which is essentially uncivilised, lacking in self-control and intelligence. I don't like it. It always strikes me as disagreeable and behind the times; a step backwards. No, we won't do that. I'd rather take the greater risk of publicity. I'm dropping one principle, but I don't want to drop more than I need."
Kitty laughed silently, and slipped her hand into his. "All right, you shan't. We'll get tied up properly at your country registry, and keep some of our principles and hang the risk.... I oughtn't to let you, you know. If it comes out it will wreck your career and perhaps wreck the Ministry and endanger the intellect of the country. We may be sowing the seeds of another World War; but—oh, I'm bored with being high-principled about it."
"It's too late to be that," said Chester. "We've got to go ahead now."
He consulted his pocket-book and said that he was free on August 10th, and that they would then get married and go to Italy for a fortnight's holiday together. They made the other arrangements that have to be made in these peculiar circumstances, and then Chester went back to his hotel.
The awful, airless, panting night through which the Chesterfield furnaces flamed, lay upon the queer, crooked black city like a menace. Kitty, leaning out of her window and listening to Chester's retreating steps echoing up the street, ran her fingers through her damp dark hair, because her head ached, and murmured, "I don't care. I don't care. What's the good of living if you can't have what you want?"
Which expressed an instinct common to the race, and one which would in the end bring to nothing the most strenuous efforts of social and ethical reformers.
They got married. Chester took, for the occasion, the name of Gilbert Lewis; it was surprising how easy this was. The witness looked attentively at him, but probably always looked like that at the people getting married. Neither he nor the registrar looked intelligent, or as if they were connecting Chester's face with anything they had seen before.
After the performance they went to Italy for a fortnight. Italy in August is fairly safe from English visitors. They stayed at Cogoleto, a tiny fishing town fifteen miles up the coast from Genoa, shut in a little bay between the olive hills and the sea. To this sheltered coast through the summer months people come from the hot towns inland and fill every lodging and inn and pitch tents on the shore, and pass serene, lazy, amphibious days in and out of a sea which has the inestimable advantage over English seas that it is always at hand.
The Chesters too passed amphibious days. They would rise early, while the sea lay cool and smooth and pale and pearly in the morning light, and before the sand burnt their feet as they walked on it, and slip in off the gently shelving shore, and swim and swim and swim. They were both good swimmers. Chester was the stronger and faster, but Kitty could do more tricks. She could turn somersaults like an eel, and sit at the bottom of the sea playing with pebbles, with open eyes gazing up through clear green depths. When they bathed from a boat, she turned head over heels backwards from the bows, and shot under the boat and came up neatly behind the stern. Chester too could perform fairly well; their energy and skill excited the amazed admiration of thebagnanti, who seldom did more than splash on the sea's edge or bob up and down with swimming belts a few yards out. Chester and Kitty would swim out for a mile, then lie on their backs and float, gazing up into the sea-blue sky, before the sun had climbed high enough to burn and blind. Then they would swim back and return to the inn and put on a very few clothes and have their morning coffee, and then walk up the coast, taking lunch, to some little lonely cove in the shadow of rocks, where they would spend the heat of the day in and out of the sea. When they came out of the water they lay on the burning sands and dried themselves, and talked or read. When the heat of the day had passed a little, and the sea lay very smooth and still in the late afternoon, with no waves at all, only a gentle, whispering swaying to and fro, they would go further afield; climbing up the steep stone-paved mule-tracks that wound up the hills behind, passing between grey olive groves and lemon and orange gardens and vineyards of ripening vines and little rough white farmhouses, till they reached the barer, wilder hill slopes of pines and rocks, where the hot sweetness of myrtle and juniper stirred with each tiny moving of sea air.
They would climb often to the top of one or other of this row of hills that guarded the bay, and from its top, resting by some old pulley well or little shrine, they would look down over hills and sea bathed in evening light, and see to the east the white gleam of Genoa shimmering like a pearl, like a ghost, between transparent sea and sky, to the west the point of Savona jutting dark against a flood of fire.
There was one hill they often climbed, a steep little pine-grown mountain crested by a little old chapel, with a well by its side. The chapel was dedicated to the Madonna della Mare, and was hung about inside with votive offerings of little ships, presented to the Madonna by grateful sailors whom she had delivered from the perils of the sea. Outside the chapel a shrine stood, painted pink, and from it the mother and child smiled kindly down on the withered flowers that nearly always lay on the ledge before them.
By the shrine and the well Chester and Kitty would sit, while the low light died slowly from the hills, till its lower slopes lay in evening shadow, and only they on the summit remained, as if en-chanted, in a circle of fairy gold.
One evening while they sat there a half-witted contadino slouched out of the chapel and begged from them. Chester refused sharply, and turned his face away. The imbecile hung about, mouthed a confused prayer, bowing and crossing, before the shrine, got no help from that quarter either, and at last shambled disconsolately down the hillside, crooning an unintelligible song to himself.
Kitty, looking at Chester, saw with surprise that his face was rigid with disgust; he looked as if he were trying not to shudder.
"How you hate them, Nicky," she said curiously.
He said "I do," grimly, and spoke of something else.
But a little later he said abruptly, "I've never told you much about my people, Kitty, have I, or what are called my early years?"
"You wouldn't, of course," she replied, "any more than I should. We're neither of us much interested in the past; you live in the future, and I live in the present moment.... But I should be interested to hear, all the same."
"That imbecile reminded me," Chester said grimly. "I had a twin sister like that, and a brother not very far removed from it. You know that, of course; but you'll never know, no onecanever know who's not experienced it, what it was like.... At first, when I began to do more than just accept it as part of things as they were, it only made me angry that such things should be possible, and frightfully sorry for Joan and Gerald, who had to go about like that, so little use to themselves or anyone else, and so tiresome to me and Maggie (she's my eldest sister; I'd like you to meet her one day). I remember even consulting Maggie as to whether it wouldn't be a good thing to take them out into a wood and lose them, like the babes in the wood. I honestly thought it would be for their own good; I knew I should have preferred it if I had been them. But Maggie didn't agree; she took a more patient line about it than I did; she always does. Then, as I grew older, I became angry with my parents, who had no right, of course, to have had any children at all; they were first cousins, and deficiency was in the family.... It was that that first set me thinking about the whole subject. I remember I asked my father once, when I was about seventeen, how he had reconciled it with his conscience (he was a dean at that time) to do such a thing. I must have been an irritating young prig, of course; in fact, I remember that I was. He very properly indicated to me that I was stepping out of my sphere in questioning him on such a point, and also that whatever is must be sent by Providence, and therefore right. I didn't drop it at once; I remember I argued that it hadn't "been" and therefore had not necessarily been right, until he and my mother made it so; but he closed the conversation; quite time too, I suppose. It was difficult to argue with my father in those days; it's easier now, though not really easy. I think the reduction of the worldly condition of bishops has been good for him; it has put him in what I suppose is called a state of grace. I don't believe he'd do it now, if he lived his life again. However, he did do it, and the result was two deficient children and one who grew up loathing stupidity in the way some few people (conceivably) loathe vice, when they've been brought into close contact with its effects. It became an obsession with me; I seemed to see it everywhere, spoiling everything, blocking every path, tying everyone's hands. The Boer war happened while I was at school.... Good Lord.... Then I went to Cambridge, and it was there that I really began to think the thing seriously out. What has always bothered me about it is that human beings are so astoundinglyclever; miraculously clever, if you come to think of it, and compare us with the other animals, so like us in lots of ways. The things we've done; the animal state we've grown out of; the things we've discovered and created—it makes one's head reel. And if we can be clever like that, why not be a little cleverer still? Why be so abysmally stupid about many things? Thewasteof it.... The world might get anywhere if we really developed our powers to their full extent. But we always slip up somewhere: nothing quite comes off as it should. Think of all these thousands of years of house-managing, and the really clever arrangements which have been made in connection with it—and then visit a set of cottages and see the mess; a woman trying to cook food and clean the house and look after children and wash clothes, all by hand, and with the most inadequate contrivances for any of it. Why haven't we thought of some way out of that beastly, clumsy squalor and muddle yet? And why do houses built and fitted like some of those still exist? If we're clever enough to have invented and built houses at all, why not go one better and do it properly? It's the same with everything. Medical science, for instance. The advances it's made fill one with amaze and admiration; but why is there still disease? And why isn't there a cure for every disease? And why do doctors fail so hopelessly to diagnose anything a little outside their ordinary beat? There it is; we've been clever about it in a way, but nothing like clever enough, or as clever as we've got to be before we've done. The same with statesmanship and government; only there we've very seldom been clever at all; that's still to come. And our educational system ... oh Lord.... The mischief is that people in general don'twantother people to become too clever; it wouldn't suit their turn. So the popular instinct for mucking along, for taking things as you find them (and leaving them there), the popular taste for superficial twaddle in literature and politics and science and art and religion is pandered to on its own level....
"But I didn't mean to go off on to all this; I merely meant to tell you what first started me thinking of these things."
"Go on," said Kitty. "I like it. It makes me feel at home, as if I was sitting under you at a meeting.... What I infer is that if your parentshadn'tbeen first cousins and had deficiency in their family, there would have been no Ministry of Brains. I expect your father was right, and whatever is is best.... Of course the interesting question is, what would happen if ever weweremuch cleverer than we are now? What would happen, that is, besides houses being better managed and disease better treated and locomotion improved and books better written or not written at all, and all that? What would happen to nations and societies and governments, if people in general became much more intelligent? I can't imagine. But I think there'd be a jolly old row.... Perhaps we shall know before long."
"No," said Chester. "We shan't know that. There may be a jolly old row; I daresay there will; but it won't be because people have got too clever; it will be because they haven't got clever enough. It'll be the short-sighted stupidity of people revolting against their ultimate good."
"As it might be you and me."
"Precisely. As it might be you and me.... What we're doing is horribly typical, Kitty. Don't let's ever blind ourselves to its nature. We'll do it, because we think it's worth it; but we'll do it with our eyes open. Thank heaven we're both clear-headed and hard-headed enough to know what we're doing and not to muddle ourselves with cant about it.... That's one of the things that I suppose, I love you for, my dear—your clear-headedness. You never muddle or cant or sentimentalise. You're hard-headed and clear-eyed."
"In fact, cynical," said Kitty.
"Yes. Rather cynical. Unnecessarily cynical, I think. You could do with some more faith."
"Perhaps I shall catch some from you. You've got lots, haven't you? As the husband is the wife is; I am mated to, etc.... And you're a lot cleverer than I am, so you're most likely right.... We're awfully different, Nicky, my love, aren't we?"
"No doubt we are. Who isn't?"
For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight.
So they looked at one another, speculating, until speculation faded into seeing, and instead of personalities they became to one another persons, and Chester saw Kitty red-lipped and golden-eyed and black-lashed and tanned a smooth nut-brown by sun and sea, and Kitty saw Chester long and lean and sallow, with black brows bent over deep, keen, dreaming eyes, and lips carrying their queer suggestion of tragedy and comedy.
"Isn't it fun," said Kitty, "that you are you and I am I? I think it must be (don't you?) the greatest fun that ever was since the world began. That's what I think ... and everywhere millions of people are thinking exactly the same. We're part of the common herd, Nicky—the very, very commonest herd of all herds. I think I like it rather—being so common, I mean. It's amusing. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said, and smiled at her. "I think I do."
Still they lay there, side by side, in the extraordinary hushed sweetness of the evening. Kitty's cheek was pressed against short warm grass. Close to her ear a cicale chirped, monotonously bright; far off, from every hill, the frogs began their evening singing.
Kitty, as she sometimes did, seemed to slip suddenly outside the circle of the present, of her own life and the life around her; far off she saw it, a queer little excited corner of the universe, where people played together and were happy, where the funny world spun round and round and laughed and cried and ran and slept and loved and hated, and everything mattered intensely, and yet, as seen from outside the circle, did not matter at all.... She felt like a soul unborn, or a soul long dead, watching the world's antics with a dispassionate, compassionate interest....
The touch of Chester's hand on her cheek brought her back abruptly into the circle again.
"Belovedest," he said, "let's come down the hill. The light is going."
One day they had a shock; they met someone they knew. They met him in the sea; at least he was in a boat and they were in the sea. They were swimming a mile from shore, in a pearl-smooth, golden sea, in the eye of the rising sun. Half a mile out from them a yacht lay, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. From the yacht a boat shot out, rowed by a man. It shot between the swimmers and the rising sun. Chester and Kitty were lying on their backs, churning up the sun's path of gold with their feet, and Kitty was singing a little song that Greek goat-herds sing on the hills above Corinth in the mornings.
Leaning over the side and resting on his oars, the man in the boat shouted, "Hullo, Chester!"
An electric shock stabbed Kitty through at the voice, which was Vernon Prideaux's. Losing her nerve, her head, and her sense of the suitable, she splashed round on to her chest, kicked herself forward, and dived like a porpoise, travelling as swiftly as she could from Chester, Prideaux, and the situation. When she came up it was with a splutter, because she had laughed. Glancing backwards over her shoulder, she saw Chester swimming towards the boat. What would he say? Would he speak of her, or wrap her in discreet silence? And had Prideaux recognised her or not?
"Lunatic," said Kitty. "Of course he did. I have taken the worst way, in my excitement."
Promptly she retraced her path, this time on the water's surface, and hailed Prideaux as she came.
"Hullo, Vernon. The top of the morning to you. I thought I'd show you I could dive.... What brings you here? Oh the yacht, of course...." She paused, wondering what was to be their line, then struck one out on her own account. "Isn't it odd; Mr. Chester and I are both staying near here."
Prideaux's keen, well-bred, perfectly courteous face looked for one moment as if it certainly was a little odd; then he swallowed his surprise.
"Are you? It's a splendid coast, isn't it? Cogoleto in there, I suppose? We're not stopping at all, unfortunately; we're going straight on to Genoa.... I'm coming in."
He dived neatly from the bows, with precision and power, as he wrote minutes, managed deputations, ignored odd situations, and did everything else. One was never afraid with Prideaux; one could rely on him not to bungle.
They bathed together and conversed, till Kitty said she must go in, and swam shoreward in the detached manner of one whose people are expecting her to breakfast. Soon afterwards she saw that Prideaux was pulling back to the yacht, and Chester swimming westward, as if he were staying at Varazze.
"Tact," thought Kitty. "This, I suppose, is how people behave while conducting a vulgar intrigue. Ours is a vulgar marriage; there doesn't seem much difference.... I rather wish we could have told Vernon all about it; he's safe enough, and I should like to have heard his comments and seen his face. How awful he would think us.... I don't know anyone who would disapprove more.... Well, I suppose it's more interesting than a marriage which doesn't have to be kept dark, but it's much less peaceful."
They met at the inn, at breakfast.
"Did you have to swim right across the bay, darling?" Kitty enquired. "I'm so sorry. By the way, I noticed that Vernon never asked either of us where we were staying, nor invited us to come and visit the yacht. Do you suppose he believed a word we said?"
Chester lifted his eyebrows. "His mental category is A, I believe," he replied.
"Well," said Kitty, "anyhow he can't know we're married, even if he does think we've arranged to meet here. And Vernon's very discreet; he won't babble."
Chester ate a roll and a half in silence. Then he remarked, without emotion, "Kitty, this thing is going to come out. We may as well make up our minds to it. We shall go on meeting people, and they won't all be discreet. It will come out, as certainly as flowers in spring, or the Clyde engineers next week."
They faced one another in silence for a moment across the coffee and rolls. Then, because there seemed nothing else which could meet the situation, they both began to laugh helplessly.
Three days later they returned to England, by different routes.